Apologies...life is what happens when you're writing blogs...some of the life going on around here has meant that I may be the only person for whom this makes sense or who can follow the flow of it...
Good Luck!
I started working with people who were labelled as 'intellectually disabled' in 1994.
After a very lacklustre University experience I left Edinburgh without a degree, my hopes and dreams for the future in tatters. I needed a job but I couldn't think of many things that a failed Church of Scotland Deaconess who'd had a nervous breakdown; a long-ish psychiatric hospital career; crises of faith and confidence and a reputation for 'never sticking at anything' could do. It all seemed a bit bleak and my old patterns of failure and flight were cranking up nicley...
I've known a few miracles in my life and at Algrade in Humbie, a small village at the foot of the Lammermuir Hills in the Scottish Borders another miracle occurred.
Algrade was a originally a school, set up in the 1960s...so named because it took 'All grades' of people with disability. (Not actually true...most of the people there had very moderate degrees of intellectual disability). In it's time, it was regarded as a very fine school with an emphasis on giving people an education.
Over the years, the attention to learning waned and instead Algrade became a holding place for the people who lived there. They became increasingly isolated and trapped within the very conservative Christian ideology espoused by the owners. Eventually, after 12 YEARS of suggestions, requests, instructions and then warning from the Registration and Inspection body of the Department of Social work the Certificate of Registration was withdrawn. The Church of Scotland Board of Social Responsibility moved in as Caretaker Managers and I got a job there. Within 24 hours of the Church taking over, 11 of the men who lived there made allegations of sexual abuse against a former member of staff. Everyday there were new stories of abuse and neglect, bullying...the list was long...
The physical condition of the place was bleak...cold...run down...not very clean...some of it just not safe...This was in stark contrast to the outward appearance of a country idyll...whitewashed cottages dotting the green hillside...whited sepulchres...disguising abuse and corruption and just plain old meanness...
In the beginning, I was outraged...openly, often incoherently, frequently 'inappropriately'...I was consumed by it. It leaked out of me, sometimes through tears but mostly it was a story that I couldn't stop telling...I told it everywhere, to anyone who would listen...
I just couldn't get over what had been done to this group of people. I couldn't believe that we'd had concerns for 12 years and we'd managed to hold on to them...12 years...and I was about to spontaneously combust because the pace of change and improvement for them was glacially slow...
The brief version of the ending to the Algrade story is that people were moved out to more individual accommodation...some are happy and settled...some are not...
As far as I know, no-one has been compensated for the shit their life turned into...
For me, Algrade was the experience of my life...it started me on a path that has led me here. It was transformative...I learned to think differently...to intentionally choose to see people and situations in another way. Through my work there (and at the risk of sounding really farty) i believe that I found my calling...my life's purpose...however you want to express that.
I don't think that the call is about 'disability'.
I do think that it's about justice.
The injustice...the unjust - ness of Algrade consumed me for a very long time. And then I just seemed to lose the sting of it...there's so much of it around...in so many different places. I found my tolerance for injustice grew and I became adept at understanding and accommodating the reasons...the circumstances...the excuses for why things are the way they are.
It was as if the constant rub of it created a callous. A thick skin grew over the sore places and I got used to living with it.
Last week's experience on the PASSING course has wakened me up a bit. The fine detail of it has forced me to confront again the epic failure of most services to support people well. That realisation, combined with busted mattresses and dust under the counters and the expectations that people will just PUT UP with whatever crap gets thrown at them has just hit me between the eyes.
I'm mad at piss-poor performance from services that make money from people with disabilities.
I am beside myself at shabby, shoddy, won't close doors, won't wash pots, won't extend myself in any way type services where people just take the money and run out the door as fast as their legs will carry them...
I'm over condescension and patronisation (is that a word?) and I'm particularly over it from people who don't seem to realise that unless there's a verb in there...a 'doing word'...then there is no sense in their 'sentences' and that the empty string of words with which they patronise and condescend is meaningless and offensive.
I am incandescent at the smugness of people who should know better, who dismiss people with a casual 'they just don't get it' and do nothing to explain or help understanding but only condemn and scoff (guilty as charged your honour...)
I feel exfoliated...all raw and pink skinned...plunged into a salted pool and just...stinging...
How this will work out as I try to do my work I have no idea...but at the very least I feel as if I have reconnected with my purpose or calling...I feel more alive than I have for a long time.
So...just to close...
To all those people at Algrade...
to Margaret and Christine and Mary and Kay and Claudia and Helen and Ann and Charlotte and Jane and Crawford and Willie and Bryan and John and Garry and Thomas and Norah and Stuart and Paul and Peter and Meg and Billy and the woman with the bags whose name I can't remember, I think it was Irene...
Thanks for all that you taught me. I'm sorry for all the times I got it wrong.
I hope you're finding a good life somewhere.
p.s. Her name is Irene
